Caylin Capra-Thomas's second chapbook, Inside My Electric City, is available from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of the Louisville Literary Arts Association's 2016 Writer's Block Prize in Poetry, and Yemassee's 2016 Nonfiction Prize. Her poems have appeared or will soon in journals including New England Review, Crazyhorse, Salt Hill, Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

So, everything failed. The jabbed-iron trees flamed outin spectacular failure along the ragged range. Forecastfailed. The pollster that glistered turned huckster. And
the memory of that ex who called you petit bouchonfailed to reassure that you once loved wreckful and recklessand in a foreign tongue. All around you now Florida fails pinklyand by voracious flora. The lizard who burned or drownedhot-tubbing in your hot coffee failed perfectly, curled intoan eternal question mark, little fingers clenched, dukes up. If death is the body’s failure, it is also its final fuck you. Which has to count for something. Which has to be a win.

LIGHTNING SUSPECTED IN DEATHS OF HORSES

I want to take you to the black-mud spring pasturewhere six horses fell and did not get back up.I don’t know if they were dark or dappled—I wasn’t there. I read it in a newspaper in Vermont,sitting at the counter of a diner that no longerexists. Lightning Suspected in Deaths of Horses—small article in a bottom corner, not muchmore information than that. It struck me—I’m not trying to be funny—I carriedthat headline around until it became a sloganalthough I’m not sure what I’d been sold.Maybe this: the sky opens, you kneeland beg its mercy and it doesn’t makeone lick of difference. Or, light appearsand your life is transformed. Finally gettingexactly what you’ve asked for all along:a shift in luck, sudden brilliance, your bodylit, electric, your own enough to let it go.